Artificial intelligence (AI) scams are fraudulent activities that use AI such as voice cloning, deepfake videos, large language models, and increasingly autonomous AI agents to deceive people in ways that would be impossible for human scammers to accomplish on their own. AI agents are advanced, autonomous, or semi-autonomous software systems that independently plan, analyze, and carry out tasks.The fastest-growing method in the dataset is AI chatbots and agents that run scams from initial contact to payment.A hacker recently attacked over 1,200 websites and successfully gained access to over 100 of them using commercially available AI agents.Using AI agents that handled most of the reconnaissance, vulnerability testing, and exploitation, the Chinese-speaking hacker targeted websites in the US, Canada, Australia, and Japan.Hackers typically give AI agents very brief instructions. The systems check websites for vulnerabilities on their own after receiving instructions.According to experts, these scams are powered by free, anonymous, and non-technical AI tools with zero cost, zero skill, and zero accountability.
